Risk Your (social) Life: Dungeons & Dragons Online
Friends and coworkers alike can tell you that I have a serious problem with MMORPG’s. Every cliché surrounding the crack-like nature of their addictiveness rings true and if I’m not looking for something to level or loot to brag about, I’m in search for the most awesome of hats to compliment my latest avatar. When I read Massively I can only imagine that this is what recovering sex addicts reading Hustler must feel like.
Which brings us to this past week and my 10-day free trial of Turbine’s other forgotten RPG, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. Though it’s been around for almost two years now, I’ve only ever met one person who has actually played it and that was before release even. Despite a lack of anyone I know playing it, it’s somehow been popping up more and more in conversation. Maybe everyone is burnt out of what’s available and they’re not sure about the year ahead. Regardless, I wanted to see what all the fuss, or lack of, is all about.
Before I go into why this didn’t click for me, I should explain what I’m looking for: a solid PvE experience with decent customization (If I can’t be pretty, I’m not playing!) and enough superficial crap to keep me busy. Dungeons & Dragons Online gets two of the three mostly right and it even has some of the most exciting PvP combat I’ve seen in a modern MMO (seriously, Fury wishes it was like this). That third missing element though is the superficial crap. If I can’t craft or whittle or at least play a guitar, there’s not much else to do other than dungeon and possibly dragon, should I feel up to the challenge. It’s fluff, but also a necessary evil. Imagine World of Warcraft if you couldn’t make mechanical chicken robots. Yeah, I wouldn’t play either.
There’s also the needlessly convoluted user interface that’s completely unacceptable for a game that was released two years after the advent of World of Warcraft. How bad can an interface possibly be, you ask? It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to buy something from a vendor. Unlike games of the post-WoW era, Dungeons & Dragons features a completely different interface for everything you can think of. Purchasing items, selling items, buying skills, choosing quests … its all completely different. After dunking a few hours into the game, I’m still not even sure if I learned any new skills.
But would it matter? Unless you’re a dice rolling prodigy, figuring out whether or not you’ve improved comes down to solving what amounts to algebra for uber-dorks. Is this new mace going to provide you with more damage per second? To find out, simply solve p(x)=x^3 but only if +13 on saving roll (14+x) divided by how pissed off you are at not knowing whether to equip this mace or not. It’s a master craft, right? It has to be good. I can’t fault it for being Dungeons & Dragons, but I sure can for it hating anyone who doesn’t already know this stuff.
When I was down in the dungeons and tackling the unique questing structure (gotta love that dungeon master), I found myself really enjoying the experience despite the amount of hate and malice I seem to be spitting today. Dungeons & Dragons Online is definitely something I’d recommend to folks, but I don’t think I’d actually pay money for it. It seems to be lacking some real meat and we all know what the Quizno’s girl has to say about that.
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